Level III: External relations Home visits
Chart 5 Trust Level
6. Border region or contact zone
Ethnic and ethno-social processes in small regions between the Hungarian-Slovak language and state border
László Szarka
Border and identity. The Hungarian-Slovak state border, lan-guage border and contact zone
For researchers studying ethnic processes, minority commu-nities and the phenomena of identity, the inseparable inter-weaving of space and community is a primary experience encountered on the field. What belongs to this subject?
Among others are the local linkage and characteristics, local language usage, communication and social patterns, local patriotism and solidarity. And naturally, the so-called “local knowledge” which is an expression of the local spirituality
PL
SK
Váh Danube
Bratislava Šahy
Rožòava
Košice
Šamorín
Dunajská Streda Komárno
CZ
HU
A
and which is often framed into a defined program. There are examples when movements of provincialism and regionalism sprout out from similar programs, based on condensed ideo-logical images.
The unaccountable other particulars observable on the field, the emotional attachment that the researcher experi-ences during interviews and techniques of symbolical and power definitions of space demonstrate that field and identity, space and community identity represent indissoluble unities.
In the followings, with the help of some demographic data I would like to show the differences between the living spaces of the Hungarian minority in rural and urban environment.
According to the 1991 census, of the overall 2.7 millions of the Hungarian ethnic minority living in countries neighbouring Hungary, almost sixty per cent lives in 1,410 communities with a majority of Hungarian speaking population. In Transylvania the number of urban centres where the majority of population is of Hungarian nationality, is eighteen; in Slovakia this number is thirteen, in Vojvodina (Serbia) nine and in Transcarpathian Ukraine it is only two. Thus, of the total number of 344 urban centres where ethnic Hungarian live, only 42 have a majority Hungarian population. Besides, at a closer look at these communities we find significant regional differences between the majority and minority set-tlement structures.
The number of communities and persons living in non-majority Hungarian communities is steadily increasing. On the one hand, this is related to the fact that in big and middle-sized towns the ethnic and linguistic space loss is an irre-versible process (with the only exception of small and middle-sized towns in Székelyföld1 in Transylvania, Csallóköz2 in Slovakia and Bodrogköz). On the other hand, in the last decades, the Hungarian population rate of villages in ethnic contact zones and in always larger regions with scattered dis-tribution of minority population has been also speedily drop-ping.
Moreover, the intensive demographic growth of Romany communities in Central Eastern Europe and their segregation
observable within numerous communities have stimulated great changes, too3.
The seven Hungarian minority communities4as the so far passive subjects of the local state and regional policies had only a very limited power to initiate significant and positive changes in the regional and settlement development policy.
Within these circumstances, the high population rate of towns and big-settlements in Vojvodina (72.9%) can count as the starting point for serious development projects the same way as the small-settlement structure of the Hungarian vil-lages in Slovenia can count.5
Among the sociological statistical data which relate to the spatial location and which have an influence on individual and group ethnic identity I would like to mention the religious indi-cators. Whereas a generally high-speed atheisation is typical for the region, ten years ago the average of atheists among the Hungarian minority was only 5.6 per cent (in Transylvania:
0.3%, in Slovakia: 19.5%).
Within the identity factors of the Hungarian ethnic minori-ty and of local communities (families and persons constitut-ing this minority), generally the dominant motives are those which at the given moment are considered as particularly important by the elite of the minority society (be it at local or state level), and which are eventually celebrated, demon-strated or defended by them. Among these, the Hungarian historical memories of the local community or region, the statues, tombs, monuments and museums of its important personalities figurate as the most frequent spatial “identity-producing” factors. These factors “work” without particular intellectual influence as well, especially if they are included-and in the last decade they were- into the educational pro-gramme of local Hungarian education institutes.
The most important tie between space and national-eth-nic identity is, naturally, the language. The locally spoken lan-guage, its contact variations, which distinguish one commu-nity from the other and which make it different from the lan-guage used in Hungary, represent the most significant differ-ence. Beside this, the distinguished style of speakers coming
from Hungary, which misses all features of dialects, the monolingualism of non-Hungarian persons living in bilingual zones, the by-law-imposed bilingualism at official occasions, figurate all as the linguistic demonstrators of a complex space-identity system.
Local traditions always have their interethnic and ethnic-centred reference-system: national or religious celebrations, rites and memorial events all call for taking up a position from the side of the non-Hungarian majority population as well. In most of the cases, however, this entails a passive non-atten-dance from their side.
In this context the symbolical space-occupying events, programs and traditions all aiming at defining, defending or re-conquering ethnic and cultural borders are very important spatial elements of the Hungarian minority identity.
Behind the great social changes of the last decade, ambiguous, but at the same time, radical economic changes are also present; every segment of the economic life previ-ously supervised by the state, i.e. production, labour market, sale, market, investment, all have been removed from state control. Apart from compensation, reprivatisation and privati-sation, “wild privatisation”, bankruptcy, big rate sale-offs and conscious disorganising efforts, positive processes have also appeared: private small and family enterprises, local and community budget management, regional thinking and devel-opment projects, etc.
These factors can speed up the generation-change processes and the internal and external immigration within the Hungarian minority societies. The urbanisation based on the socialist model has proved inefficient; fortunately, radical systematisation and settlement reorganising plans have only been partly realised. The majority of Central Eastern European villages remained at a very low level of urbanisa-tion, which according to Western European norms corre-sponds to the situation of thirty-forty years ago. Town-struc-tures had been estranged from local traditions and commu-nity needs by inhabitable falanster-sites. These precedents typical of the entire Central Eastern Europe will also affect
local and regional urbanistic, reorganisation and consolida-tion development projects in the following decade. Before the assimilation scenery - log house quarters disappearing from big and small towns - it is important to study and to record the data relating to the identity creating and identity dissolv-ing processes of socialist urbanisation.
How do these and similar spatial processes influence the identity of Hungarian minority communities? Which of the two models will define the ethnic processes in the following years and following decades: the acculturation model- and within it integration and twofold identity forms fostered by bilingual and bi-cultural environment- or the bipolar assimilation process leading towards marginalisation?
Are life situations of minorities always necessarily border-line cases loaded with tensions? Do the transformation of border regions, which all belonged to peripheries once, and the takeover of power by ethnic space- and identity- struc-tures, show the end of over-regulation and unidirectional char-acter of identity-creating processes?
Indeed, the village as a minority living space still bears char-acteristics which distinguish it from the town. These character-istics are ambivalent: the “swept away” villages of Dezsö Szabó6can be drawn on the map of Hungarian minorities in the same way as those villages which have the force to keep their ethnic identity. Today we know that this holding force comes not solely from the village itself. The village with its delicate social, spiritual and historical network is able to reproduce and rein-force this identity; or, on the contrary, the changing and radi-cally transformed peasant society, and later the commuting,
“outworking” village communities, which at the present forced-ly switched to agricultural entrepreneurs (or in a worse case to unemployment), transform and push this identity into the back-ground. Towns, in particular the centres of regions with Hungarian majority in Southern Slovakia, such as Šamorín, Dunajská Streda, Komárno, Šahy and Rožòava could be identi-ty-keeping and identity-strengthening centres of Hungarian com-munities to the same extent or even better (due to advantages deriving from their position) as today the village is.
The Hungarian-Slovak border as a research subject On both sides of the 679 km long Hungarian-Slovak state bor-der we find cultural and economic small regions, influence spheres around towns and market districts which are geo-graphically, historically, ethnographically and ethnically very close to one another, and which once belonged to the same administration government.
There is an often heard phrase in Hungary: Hungary, at least in the ethnic sense of the word, is adjoining itself: on the opposite side of its borders there are communities inhab-ited by the same population, by the Hungarians. This state-ment contains much truth but in present days it is also becoming more and more distant from reality.
Below, I would like to describe some ideas about the his-torical creation and the ethnic peculiarities of this contact zone between the state border and the language border and about the mediatory and contact-creating role of the local Hungarian and non-Hungarian population. In the last decades, intensive changes of ethnic character were taking place in these regions. These changes are continuing even in present days. I would like to introduce one element of these changes and through it to draw consequences regarding the ethnic background of the dynamism and particular contact-creating potential hidden in this border region.
I intend to briefly analyse the ethnically mixed contact zone in the Southern Slovakian border regions. The state bor-der between Czechoslovakia and Hungary was defined in 1918-1919 and finally ratified in 1920. In the past eight decades, the regions, divided by the state border, developed particular characteristics. On the one hand, the zones on the two sides of the border differ from each other; on the other hand, compared with the internal zones of the countries which include them, they have peripheral features. The once centrally located and important regions, such as Esztergom, Nógrád, Gömör and Abaúj-Torna, now divided by the state bor-der, have been gradually degraded to peripheries on both
sides, with regard to their economy, transport system and social and cultural life.
On the Czechoslovak side the interested regions fell behind in the sphere of transport network, regional develop-ment and investdevelop-ments. Every seven-eight years the adminis-tration underwent reorganisation. This situation was also a result of ethnic differentiation. After the collectivisation in the fifties, a mass of population (from its big part ethnic Hungarians) gushed from villages to towns. However, it was only in the 1960s that these towns became capable to accept and gradually assimilate these masses.
On the Hungarian side of the border, similar changes were caused by the big number of missing towns that found them-selves on the Slovak side, by roads leading to “nowhere”, by missed or delayed investments due to the lack of commercial and industrial centres.
Thus, in the past eight decades, on both sides of the state border the trauma of the separation was replaced by the experience of “failure”, i.e. by a peripheral existence, due to common historical and foreign political reasons on the one hand, and to diverse economic and home politics factors, on the other hand.
As the consequence of decades-long strict restrictions on border crossing and contact keeping, it was not possible to counterbalance the disadvantages of the peripheral state either with transit or with intensive border-crossing contacts.
The Hungarian-Slovak language border
The language border starts under Bratislava in the western edge of Csallóköz, dividing even today – with interruptions7 -the Hungarian from -the Slovak language zone for a length of 450 km. Over centuries this language border underwent numerous alterations. However, it is only in Slovakia and in the Transcarpathian Ukraine that the Hungarian language bor-der, as a linguistic geographical phenomenon, has remained so extended and so clearly definable.
In the past, we recognised three types of language bor-ders: the Hungarian language border in Slovakia belonged throughout the centuries to the sharp language border type, as its Mátyusföld8section still demonstrates.
In some places we could also find striped language border types, when in a not too broad north-southern stripe villages with Hungarian majority and villages with Slovak majority lay one next to the other (e.g. on short sections of Tekov/Bars, Nógrád and Gömör). Since the 1960s onward, the third type, the blurred language border type,became increasingly typical of the region. Extensive parts gradually turned to regions inhabited with population of mixed languages, partly due to the local population becoming bilingual, and partly due to the new incomers, i.e. inhabitants moving into the region from other parts of Slovakia, counterbalancing the local ethnic sit-uation. Particularly in the Nógrád-Gömör river valleys, the lan-guage border makes several sharp turns following the geo-graphical shapes of the valleys.
The most important spatial characteristic of Hungarian-Slovak interethnic relations is the formation of the language border. This occurred in the time following the arrival of the Hungarians in the Carpathian basin and the Mongol (Tatar) invasion. In spite of the fact that the language border went through numerous changes in the past, the ethnic structure of towns in Upper-Hungary has been shaped independently from this language border. The permanent character of the language border was, however, indicated by the ethnic divi-sional line which ran at times to the north and at other times to the south of the line made by the towns Bratislava-Senec-Nitra-Levice-Rimavská Sobota-Rožòava-Košice-Ve¾ké Kapuša-ny-Ungvár. As a popular saying says: “You find the language border where the Miatyánk finishes and the Otèe náš starts.”9
Before proceeding to the next argument, I would like to cite the definition of Štefan Šutaj on the Slovak-Hungarian state and language border10:
“The present state borders (…) are not the result of eth-nic processes, but rather the result of political decisions
taken by the Great Powers after the First and the Second World Wars, who first of all had the ethnic, economic and strategic-political development of Central Europe in sight.”
With regard to the language border, Šutaj’s definition is less clear:
If we speak about an ethnic (language) border, we have to interpret it as an auxiliary term which helps in the registra-tion of the changes occurred in the ethnic structure of the Southern Slovakian region. We cannot speak about an ‘eth-nic border’ as such, since the major part of communities in this region is ethnically not pure. It is rather a zone where two ethnic groups, two languages, live one next to the other.
(Šutaj 2001: 241) Šutaj’s views on the Hungarian-Slovak border issue are sig-nificant in many regards. His description of the formation of the state border lacking any emotional and ideological con-notations is rather unique in the Czechoslovak, Czech or Slovak specialised literature. His observations on the lan-guage border are significant, as well. The term “lanlan-guage bor-der” has always served as an auxiliary term to facilitate the definition and description of several ethnic spaces, regions.
However, the ethnic or language border has its real compe-tence and significance. In the Central Eastern European zone, over centuries, communities have always been differentiated on the base of ethnic and cultural belonging. True, language borders can never be considered as clear dividing lines, since this would mean a total segregation between two nationali-ties that live together or next to each other.
According to the data of the 1991 Czechoslovak census, in many regions the dividing lines between communities with Hungarian majority and communities with Slovak majority bear the characteristics of the stripe language border type.
However, analysing the data of Galanta, Leviceand Rožòava districts and comparing the spatial location of communities with Hungarian majority, we understand that even in present times it is possible to draw a clear boundary which divides the Hungarian from the Slovak majority region (to the north of this boundary the rate of the Hungarian population in
com-munities falls under one per cent). From the Hungarian point of view, thus, we can define the language boundary in the fol-lowing way: proceeding northwards from the Hungarian-Slovak state border villages and towns with a majority of Hungarian speaking population (over fifty, eighty and even above ninety five per cent) come as first. Within this zone, there are islands of Slovak majority population. Proceeding northward, approaching the language border, a growing num-ber of ethnically mixed communities follow, inhabited by a majority of Slovak population. The language border is consti-tuted by the chain of those villages and towns whose inhabi-tants are from 95 to 100 percent Slovaks; passing this line no communities with Hungarian majority or with ethnically mixed population can be found.
This, however, does not contradict the observation accord-ing to which the actual language borders are more and more to be searched inside communities, within single families.
The number of those families (within the Hungarian popula-tion in Slovakia) for whom a particular kind of instinctive bilin-gualism constitutes their mother tongue, is increasing. In their cases, the language border needs to be repeatedly rede-fined in their everyday practices, when it is the language user alone who decides for this or that language depending on the situation and suitability.
Indeed, the Hungarian population of Slovakia with its administratively hardly unificable (east-west) location is a folk living in valleys (except for the two largest compact zones, the Medzibodrogie (Bodrogköz in Hungarian) and Žitný Ostrov (Csallóköz). These valleys11have always been important fac-tors in the settlement organising and have significantly affected the influence-spheres of towns, the marking of trans-port routes as well as the formation of the language border.
When measuring the assimilation processes along the lan-guage border we must also consider those factors which influ-enced the ethnic space in the twentieth century: the settling and administration policy of Czechoslovakia in the period between the two world wars; the changes that occurred in the situation of the Jewish population which in the past used to belong to the Hungarian speaking group; the holocaust and
the huge losses on lives following the WWII; the conse-quences of the population exchange and resettlement in 1947-48; the gradual marginalisation of the Hungarian popu-lation of the two big towns, Bratislava and Košice. In the years of communism these were: the ethnic metamorphosis of small towns of South-Slovakia together with the expansion of individual and social bilingualism, the assimilation policy of the state which resulted in the creation of ethnically mixed regions and which failed to ensure tolerance there. Finally, in the last decades, the expansion of the Roma population with its ambivalent national identity and frequent language change appeared as an important factor influencing the assimilation processes.
The Hungarian-Slovak ethnic and cultural contact zone showed significant positive changes in the last decade: the small regions divided by the state border for eight decades and thus destined for a periphery state are now growing into real dynamic regions. Therefore, there is seemingly a chance that in the time when Central European states will enter the EU, the mass-psychological conditions for border elimination, similar to those in Western Europe, will be created. At the same time, the data of the 2001 census, i.e. the decrease of the Hungarian population by 50,000 people and the dramat-ic unemployment rates of the Levdramat-ice, Ve¾ký Krtíš, Rimavská Sobota and Rožòava districts indicate that these border regions will continue to suffer the background processes burdensome with ethnic and social tensions and potential conflicts.
Reference
Šutaj, Š. (2001), ‘Szlovák-magyar interetnikus kapcsolatok és sta-tisztikai asszimilació a dél-szlovákiai járásban’. Kisebbségkuta-tás, 10. évf. 2: 236-248.
1 The name, Székelyföld, indicates the eastern part of Transylva-nia in RomaTransylva-nia, inhabited mostly by ethnic Hungarians.